Saint-Domingue, August 1791. Léopold d’Auverney, twenty, nephew of one of the richest planters on the island, marries his cousin Marie the very night the slave uprising sets the plain ablaze. The man he knows as Pierrot — the slave who saved Marie from an alligator and broke the master’s whip — reappears as Bug-Jargal, insurgent…

A Paris workman — clever, dignified, unable to read — steals in a hard winter. To the woman and child it gave three days’ bread and warmth; to the man, five years in the converted abbey of Clairvaux, on rations half what a working man needs, where a boy named Albin shares his food and…

Norway, 1699. Ordener Guldenlew, the viceroy’s son, secretly loves Ethel, raised inside the fortress where her father — a disgraced ex-chancellor — has been imprisoned since her infancy. To save the old man from a manufactured treason plot, Ordener goes into the mountains after a stolen iron casket and its taker: Hans of Iceland, a…

Jean Valjean served nineteen years in the galleys for stealing a loaf of bread. Released with a yellow passport that closes every door in town, he is taken in by a bishop, robs him, is dragged back — and is handed the silver candlesticks too, with a quiet sentence that buys his soul for good.…

1793, the Terror. The old Marquis de Lantenac lands on the Breton coast to weld the royalist Vendée into an army — “No quarter” is his first order. Sent to stop him: his grand-nephew Gauvain, a viscount turned republican commander who pardons everyone. Sent to watch Gauvain: Cimourdain, a priest who lost his faith but…

Condemned to death. A man in a Bicêtre cell — no name, no stated crime, guilty by his own admission — keeps a journal from sentencing to scaffold: the wan jury, the sunlit courtroom, the galley-chain, the turnkey who takes five francs to show him to sightseers, the three-year-old daughter brought to say goodbye who…

England, 1690: the child-buyers who carve children into curiosities abandon a ten-year-old on the frozen Portland coast, his face cut into a permanent grin. Crossing the snow he saves a blind infant from her dead mother’s breast; both are taken in by Ursus, a misanthrope quack who travels with a wolf. The boy becomes Gwynplaine,…

Gilliatt lives alone on a rock at the edge of Guernsey, where the parish has decided he is a sorcerer because he frees caged birds and catches too many fish. He loves Déruchette, the shipowner Lethierry’s niece, from behind her garden wall. Then Lethierry’s steamboat — the first in the Channel — is wrecked on…

Paris, January 1482, the Feast of Fools. La Esmeralda dances in the Grève with her clever goat, and four men want her at once: a starving poet who owes her his life, a captain who wants an evening, an archdeacon who wants her soul or her death, and Quasimodo — the deaf, one-eyed bellringer of…